Whether you’re an amateur, professional, or somewhere in between, your drums will be loud, and there are plenty of options with a range of costs to help keep you practicing and jamming without driving your family, friends, and neighbours nuts!
The RocktheDrums studio was built over 1.5 years, and went through many stages of evolution. Finally, it is remarkably as “sound proofed” as is possible. The kits can be played full out at 3:00 a.m. and no one in neighbourhood would be the wiser; However, mistakes were made, wrong turns were taken, money was misspent, dead ends were travelled, but in the end, we got there. This space will be reserved for documenting the progress and failures of every step of that journey to the goal of creating a sound proofed room.
Here are some links without whose help RocktheDrums studio would be largest and loudest egg-carton lined box:
They even have an instructional video demonstrating how to install their Genie Clips. RocktheDrums’ studio used the Genie Clip and hat-channel system for the inside ceiling (RWAR means technically two ceilings, an inside and an outside).
Once you’ve built your soundproof room–your “room within a room” (RWAR)–you might notice that the sound that’s staying in the room isn’t so great: you might have standing waves, reflections, etc. This is where sound or acoustic treatment comes in…enter the egg carton, foam-walled look! Yes, finally a use for those egg cartons (or their commercially manufactured studio-grade much more expensive cousins). I can’t tell you the amount of people who thought that hanging egg cartons on the their walls would “sound proof” their drum rooms–put some egg cartons on the walls of your condo, and play at 4:00 a.m. and see how long it takes for the police to arrive. However, until building the RocktheDrums studio, I wasn’t too sure myself because this egg carton sound “proofing” story is everywhere.. It wasn’t until I consulted with experts that I realized that sound proofing and acoustic treatments were two separate but equally important stages to building a studio.
This space will be reserved for documenting the ongoing project to make the RocktheDrums studio, which is sound proofed, sound better!
My first big problem was standings waves, really big ones too!
The answer to this problem was Bass Traps. The problem to this answer was how and where to get them, and how much would this cost. By this point the RTD studio has gone way, way over budget, manly due to mistakes, bad advice, etc., so there wasn’t anything left in the budget for purchasing Bass Traps; however, there was a whole bunch of construction materials left over from the build, so I built my own. I made a wood frame, placed some left over Roxul on the frame (so the frame was height of the wall, but not as wide a batt of insulation), and wrapped the whole thing with some unused herringbone curtain material, which was originally intended for drapes, but didn’t end up being needed. This was the result:
The homemade ones performed wonderfully, and really helped the standing wave problem; however, they had a couple of drawbacks: despite earnest craftsmanship, they were kind of ugly, looking more like rolled up sleeping bags, and they were heavy, which in the corners of the room weren’t that much of an issues, but mounting them along the ceiling (where I had some issues with corners) became a challenge–the straps kept coming off (more on these later) , and although they never completely fell down (I always caught them in time), if they had fallen, they’d have enough weight to do some serious damage to kits and/or the audio gear.
After some time when the budget had recovered a bit, I found this place, and outfitted the RocktheDrums studio with LENRDs, specifically their ATOM-12 system because the corner cubes not only function nicely, but look way cool!
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